In The News

After announcing he that he is infected with the AIDS virus, Magic Johnson goes on Arsenio Hall and pleads to the audience to practice safe sex. Following a 4 minute standing ovation, Johnson spent about 15 minutes talking about safe sex and AIDS. “You don’t have to feel sorry for me, because if I die tomorrow, I’ve had the greatest life.”

After a three-year investigation, two Libyans are indicted for the 1988 attack on Flight 103 that killed 270 persons. The indictments mark a major step to bringing to justice the terrorists responsible for the bombing of the plane over Lockerbie, Scotland.

European physicists produce large amounts of energy in a controlled fusion reaction and sustain it far longer than had previously been possible. The milestone is being hailed as a major step toward an unlimited source of clean energy, placing the physics community back on the fast track of making commercial fusion possible in 10 to 20 years.

Scientists at JPL release the first-ever close-up photo of an asteroid - transmitted from the Galileo spacecraft. The picture was taken as Galileo was about 1000 miles from the 12-mile-long asteroid Gaspra.

In Royal Oak, Michigan - 31 year-old fired mail carrier storms through the loading dock of the post office and kills three of his former co-workers with a sawed-off shotgun. The gunman, Thomas Mcllvane is in critical condition. An appeal of his firing for time card fraud had been turned down last week. It’s the latest in a series of revenge slayings by ex-postal employees. Last month, a fired Ridgewood, NJ postal worker killed four people. So far, twenty-four postal employees have died over the past five years in killing sprees.

Televangelist Oral Roberts writes to more than 1 million of his regular contributors to save his ministry from “satanic conspiracy.” The ministry has seen a drop in donations in the past month due to an unrelated report in which televangelist Jimmy Swaggert was seen with a prostitute in Indio, California.

Television news – November 8, 1991

Promoting his new book “Spirit of Shaolin,” David Carradine said, “he was only acting” in his series “Kung Fu” and that he has no understanding of Shaolin and that he was a fake.

Dies - Emmy-winning Composer Morton Stevens (62). Stevens was the long-time musical director for Sammy Davis Jr. and is best known for scoring TV’s “Hawaii Five-O,” “Police Woman” and “Gunsmoke.”

WUTR-TV (channel 20) in Utica, NY asks their affiliate network, ABC, for a retransmission of a file video from the gulf war for a retrospective. Trouble was, the old bulletin the network sent down the closed-circuit was picked up by several other ABC affiliates and broadcast as current gulf-war bulletin.

ABC news reports that Freddie Mercury (45), the lead singer of Queen, is gravely ill with AIDS.

Fox-TV says that it will become the first of the four majors to air paid condom advertising. President Jamie Kellner says the spots must exclusively talk about disease control and not contraception.

Music news – November 8, 1991

Famed record producer Phil Specter releases a four CD box set of his greatest hits and says he would like to get back in the studio to make some new music.